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The difficulty that we faced this year in complying with your most inspiring Christmas donation festival was choice. There are so many and such a variety of needs. To support an individual, a cause, a charity, should it be local, world wide or national. When I explained this dilemma, at the Christmas Party, your generous and talented Chairman, Brendan Wood, sprang forward and said two further cheques would be in the mail. This means that the single mother with five children will receive the cheque that will lighten her load; that General Romeo Dallaires’ appeal, to the Canadian Psychiatric Foundation luncheon, for extensive research into Post War Trauma can be further supported and we only need a bit more to pay a teacher for one year in Afghanistan, and there are a bunch of ladies coming to lunch to take care of it! What an achievement, a Christmas celebration that assists a family, helps Canadian military personnel who served their country at huge sacrifice to their mental health, and gives children of a war ravaged nation a chance to gain a measure of education and thereby hope for their future. Thank you Brendan Wood International - John and Diana Weatherall
I send a couple of big cheques to both Queen’s and McGill Universities every year now, to which I am also now adding the Royal Vic and Queen Mary Hospitals. My other main form of more altruistic and Christmasy behaviour, to which I will devote the additional largesse you have kindly provided, will be of the most direct kind: I make a tour of the battered humanity found on the streets of Montreal - area from the old Forum to Crescent St. - and provide a few bucks for as many as I can, some now rather expecting me as annual tradition. I suppose much of this goes directly to a bottle of Queberac or the like, rather than more sensible expenditures, but I still think they get a greater pleasure, maybe even benefit, out of this informal dole than they do from the services they use all the time from the Sally Ann and the Old Brewery Mission, who get a street donation from me as well. That I can do such things at all is to no small extent due to many happy years of collaborating with BWI. Some of you at BWI may be unaware that the jolly Santa Claus with the big white beard and red suit was actually the combined invention of that famous American 19th century poem, The Night Before Christmas, but even more from the Coca-Cola Company. Coca-Cola hired a Swedish artist to draw this kind of Santa (the old European St. Nick was a much thinner and grimmer figure; he was even supposed to leave lumps of coal in the stockings of little boys and girls who had not been good) in 1931. He actually used one of the drivers of the Coca-Cola trucks as his model. The image spread over the world like wildfire; by the 1940s, people already assumed Santa had always been around. As much as I regret my absence from this year’s BWI Christmas party, I’ll admit one reason I like being a teacher is my chance to annually relive Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Marking terrible term papers for hours, I start growling, “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” Sitting in the gymnasium for final exams, watching a scene that never changes, I am visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. Marking the finals, the spirit of giving begins to descend on me, generally meaning that most kids will find better news on their results than they expect or deserve; when I finish, I’m ready to go out and find people to share my sense of the gift of life and friendship. - Neil Cameron
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